There are no upstanding walls, no obvious banks, and no entry on the Ordnance Survey's historic maps. The only way the landscape gives itself away is from the air, where the buried boundaries show up as linear cropmarks, the subtle discolouration in growing crops that betrays differences in soil moisture and depth beneath. The pattern extends across a substantial area, roughly 500 metres on a northwest-to-southeast axis and 220 metres across, with some of the lines running perpendicular to one another in the way that organised, divided land tends to look when seen from above.

The site came to light during aerial survey work carried out on 3 November 1984, when a Bórd Gáis Éireann pipeline project, the Curraleigh West to Limerick gas line, prompted systematic photography along its corridor. Cropmarks recorded on that survey, catalogued as site 4/19 on Strip Map 4, revealed not just the field boundaries but associated earthworks and an enclosure. A watercourse running roughly east to west runs through the area and appears connected to the wider arrangement of features. Later aerial photography, taken in January 2003 as part of the Archaeological Survey of Ireland's aerial photographic programme, confirmed the extent of what lay below. The record was formally compiled by Fiona Rooney and uploaded to the national monuments database in June 2021, which means this is a site that has technically been known for decades but has only recently been consolidated into the public record.

Because the features are entirely subsurface, a visit to Knocklong East offers nothing immediately dramatic. The land looks like ordinary wet pasture, which in a sense is the point. Cropmarks of this kind are best observed in dry summers, when moisture stress in crops or grass reveals the buried lines most sharply, and they are accessible only through aerial images rather than on foot. The associated earthworks and enclosure recorded nearby are the more likely candidates for anything visible at ground level. Anyone wanting to examine what has been recorded should consult the national monuments database entries, where the aerial photographs, including the Digital Globe and Google Earth orthoimages, give the clearest sense of how organised and extensive the buried landscape actually is.